The customer experience is often one of the most overlooked aspects of running a successful dispensary.
As the cannabis industry continues to develop and become more competitive, retailers must differentiate the experience they offer to customers in order to set their store apart.
In this post, you’ll learn why the customer experience is so important, and how you can start using post-sale SMS surveys to collect data and drive future business decisions based on direct customer feedback.
What is the customer experience?
The customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand. It’s the relationship they develop with your dispensary, and takes into account every single touch point they may have—whether that’s reading about you in the news, browsing your website, following your social media accounts, their e-commerce or in-store experience, or the cannabis products they’ve purchased from you.
Why does the customer experience matter?
It’s proven that giving your customer a superior experience means they will buy more, be more loyal, and are more likely to refer you to friends. In other words, you’ll turn first-time customers into repeat customers and increase sales.
In a competitive industry like cannabis retail, every customer counts.
A customer who has had a positive experience contributes 14x more revenue compared to a customer who had a negative experience. A staggering 82% of customers who have had a poor experience with a company will never return.
A customer who has had a positive experience contributes 14x more revenue compared to a customer who had a negative experience.
How to start tracking the customer experience
The best way to understand your customers is to listen to their feedback.
Here’s a real-life example...
After identifying an increased desire for CBD and realizing they had a large existing selection, one Maryland-based dispensary began focusing on increasing CBD product visibility and customer education. Over the course of the next month, the dispensary committed to product awareness and saw CBD sales increase over 20%!
It sounds simple, but most cannabis brands don’t collect any feedback from customers. Accurately tracking and making an effort to improve the customer experience could be your competitive advantage since it allows you to make data-backed improvements to your business that directly reflect customer needs and desires.
The good news is you don’t have to collect customer feedback manually. Software exists that can help you gather data automatically, without any additional hardware or dispensary staff.
BudTender is a customer experience platform that allows you to interact with customers when your dispensary is top of mind. BudTender integrates directly with Flowhub POS and leading loyalty program solutions like Springbig, making it easy to automatically send SMS surveys to customers within 24-hours of completing their purchase.
The SMS surveys are completely customized with your dispensary branding, logo, and colors.
In the below example, you can see the customer receives an SMS that thanks them for shopping at their cannabis store and links to a short, custom-branded survey with questions like:
- How would you rate our ordering process? (1-5 stars)
- How would you rate our customer service? (1-5 stars)
- How would you rate the products you received? (1-5 stars)
- What problems did you encounter with the product? (open-ended)
- How would you rate your overall experience with us? (1-5 stars)
- Please provide any feedback positive or negative to help us improve our future with you. (open-ended)
Surveys like this allow recent shoppers to efficiently and quickly identify any pleasure or pain points with their experience. In exchange for providing in-depth feedback, customers are rewarded with a discount code to be presented on their next visit.
In order to track customer feedback in real-time, BudTender provides cannabis retailers with an interactive dashboard that lets them view, analyze, understand, and act upon insights across their entire customer base. Additionally, end of month reports highlight major pain points, key feedback, and identify product requests that can be used to tailor the retail experience around exactly what customers want.
Try BudTender + Flowhub today
Sending SMS surveys to collect customer feedback using the BudTender and Flowhub integration is a simple way to add a layer of connectivity between you and your customers.
By gathering information which otherwise would be missed, you’ll have a superior understanding of your customer’s experience—and can use that data to make improvements to your retail operation and product offerings.
If you’re interested in learning more about the BudTender integration with Flowhub’s POS system and other ways to improve the cannabis dispensary customer experience, please watch a demo.
If you have questions that we didn’t answer here, call us at (844) FLOWHUB or email help@flowhub.com to set up a time with our support team.
